Napster was like the lamp with the wrong pricetag

Question: If you buy a lamp in a store and notice, while checking out, that the pricetag on the lamp is $15 dollars when you know good and well that the lamp actually sells for $100, would you comment and pay the difference?

Question 2: If you give a cashier $50 for a purchase that was $46 and receive in change $14, do you give back the ten dollars?

Most people will answer no to the first question and yes to the second citing that in the second instance they would be harming a single individual who will probably have to cough up the ten bucks at the end of his/her shift. Presumably, the first instance is OK because rather than harming a single person perhaps significantly, they are harming a multitude of people by a very small margin, the idea being that no one person can be blamed and therefore the loss is spread wide to the company and consequently to the public.

The same logic seems likely to explain the widespread sharing of mp3s through Napster. By downloading a song from some anonymous user, one is not harming one individual but in an almost negligable way, harming a great many.

There is a problem with this Lamp comparison. With a "lamp" or other material good, there isn't already an existing network to obtain the product for free. For years people have been making mix tapes, recording songs off of the radio and borrowed Albums.

Also there is a measurable loss of income with the question of a mismarked product, or incorrect change given. However in the years of 1999-2000 the recordindustry saw a measurable growth in album sales. Wether the number would have been higher without napster (or possibly lower as some proponents of napster proclaim citing that napster introduces listeners to music that they might not otherwise purchase) is an unknowable factor. The same uproar was made by the recording industry with the introduction of tape recorders that allowed people to tape songs off the radio and copy their albums onto the rapidly booming cassetteformat.

I used napster briefly under "I wonder what the big deal is about" auspices. I found myself really only downloading either

In the case of a.) my use of napster fell entirely under fair use. In the case of b.) some explanation is needed. I would look for songs By band name and download what I could find that I did not have, the next time I went to a record store I would oten look for albums containing the songs that I had just downloaded. If I had not found these songs on Napster I would never have purchased tha albums (this explains my two Me First and the Gimme Gimmes CDs. I am also looking for the Reel Big Fish album where they do a cover of Hungry like the Wolf).

The problems with napster lie in interpretations of copyright law and issues about the control of distribution, not in any provable financial loss (at least that I've yet to see evidence of).